Ductwork
by DT Maxwell
Summary: The best thing about the Normandy's system of ventilation and maintenance shafts, as compared to a museum's, was the complete and utter lack of dust. Third in the Downtime series.


**Disclaimer:** _Mass Effect_ and all related concepts and characters belong to Bioware; I'm just playing in their sandbox.  
><strong>Series:<strong> Downtime  
><strong>Notes:<strong> I've always loved rogue-like characters and Kasumi ended up being such a blast to write. Plus in my personal head canon, she, Tali, and my FemShep end up forming an unholy triumvirate of giggling girlish glee. The port observatory has been officially declared Enemy Territory by the male crewmembers.

* * *

><p>Crawling through ventilation shafts and ducts was normally a process that was very, very loud and most assuredly <em>not<em> a method by which most professional thieves did their breaking-and-entering. Kasumi wasn't most thieves, however, and the _Normandy_'s system of shafts weren't the noisy, rickety death traps found in museums. No heat or motion sensors, either, which was a nice change of pace.

It probably said a lot about her that wiggling through the _Normandy_'s guts was her idea of quality entertainment. And speaking of wiggling…

Kasumi grunted as she twisted to lie on her back in the cramped shaft and stared up at a mess of piping and wiring, brushing a loose strand of hair from her eyes. (No hood while in the ducts; it was liable to get caught on something and in such tight quarters it'd be damned hot, too.) Based on the full ship schematics and construction plans she and Tali had hacked from behind EDI's blocks, she should be right beneath the CIC. The thief managed to raise her left arm and tapped a command into her omni-tool interface that sent out a ping; almost immediately she got a reading of a large power signature directly above her. Excellent, that should be the galaxy map display.

She turned on the flashlight function of her omni-tool, tightened the beam to about the size of an old-fashioned penlight, and sent another ping at a much lower frequency than the first. The returning signal was much smaller and fainter, and located above her and slightly to the left.

Kasumi flashed her light into the dark but couldn't spot what she was looking for it. Huffing impatiently, she wiggled her opposite hand into the space between two pipelines and felt around carefully. Where was that little…?

Bingo!

The thief pulled her hand back and brought it to eye level. _'Oh, Cerberus, you and your obsessive paranoia are _so_ predictable,'_ she thought fondly as she examined the recording/transmitting device she held gently between her thumb and forefinger. It was small enough to escape detection by most scanners, but powerful enough to still record gigabytes worth of conversations even through electrical interference and thick bulkheads and then transmit them to the _Normandy_'s QEC and directly to the Illusive Man's office. Simple, elegant, and not at all surprising.

Chuckling softly, Kasumi used the pinkie nail of her left hand to find the bug's tiny switch, flicked it off, and placed it in one of the pouches on her thigh. Tali would definitely want to study it before tossing it into the box of other transmitters they'd found so far. Shep liked to crush them one at a time as a form of stress therapy (for as much as she adored her sniper rifles, Shep wouldn't risk an accident by taking target practice down in the hangar), and with the crap the Illusive Man was pulling of late, the commander needed all the stress relief she could get that didn't involve large explosions.

There wasn't enough room to raise her knees at all and use her feet to push herself along, so Kasumi used her shoulders and elbows to inch her way down the shaft and continue scanning for bugs. Some she placed in her pouch; others she left where they were, but recorded their location. Removing _all_ the Cerberus bugs would just mean they would all end up replaced (and they were still trying to figure out by _whom,_ though they were pretty sure it wasn't Miranda) and she'd have to crawl through here again on another sweep.

(Which reminded her that one day she needed to get Shep to reveal just how she'd convinced EDI to ignore what they were doing and not report it in. Or maybe the Illusive Man expected the commander to do bug sweeps. Damnit, that'd be just like him, too. Unless Shep already knew that and was counting on it, which was entirely possible; a person didn't get to be an N7 graduate, an Alliance Lieutenant Commander, _and_ a Spectre without being able to see the wheels within wheels within wheels.

Okay, so maybe they should look into stress therapy for Shep that _did_ involve large explosions. Definitely time to find another merc base.

Anyway.)

She didn't mind crawling through the _Normandy._ The security programming and hacking she did for Shep was fun and kept her mind and analytical skills sharp, but sometimes it got a little repetitive. She couldn't spend all her free time writing _haiku_ and reading and gossiping shamelessly, either; fun, yes, but far from exciting, and she'd rather not get bogged down in routine.

A little extracurricular counterintelligence, though, in the dead of night, with the Cerberus night shifts to sneak around in order to slip into the vents? '_Much more my style,' _Kasumi thought cheerfully as she beamed her flashlight through the pipes for the bug she was currently hunting. Though she was definitely going to plan her excursion to sweep the ducts above the armory for regular daytime hours; it'd present more of a challenge to her skills, of course.

Tali would burst into giggles and Shep would leer playfully when she informed them of the setup of her next little outing, but the teasing was going to be _so_ worth it.


End file.
